


i'll give you my best side (tell you all my best lies)

by notcaycepollard



Category: The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (2015)
Genre: F/M, Multi, Oral Sex, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-11
Updated: 2020-09-11
Packaged: 2021-03-06 22:07:45
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,347
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26406229
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notcaycepollard/pseuds/notcaycepollard
Summary: It starts in Berlin like this: Solo cooks for her.It makes her furious, this American and all his ostentatious excess. Putting on a show for the East German chop-shop girl, as if she’ll be dazzled by French wine, rich flavours, the swirl of butter foaming in a pan. He cooks like he’s done it before, Gaby thinks, that’s clear enough, but it feels like he’s watching her watching him.She doesn’t expect that he will keep doing it.
Relationships: Illya Kuryakin/Napoleon Solo/Gaby Teller, Napoleon Solo/Gaby Teller
Comments: 20
Kudos: 245





	i'll give you my best side (tell you all my best lies)

It starts in Berlin like this: Solo cooks for her.

It's calculated, of course, Napoleon Solo in waistcoat and shirtsleeves, an apron where the other men are wearing handgun holsters. He pours her wine, shaves truffles into her risotto. It makes her furious, this American and all his ostentatious excess. Putting on a show for the East German chop-shop girl, as if she’ll be dazzled by French wine, rich flavours, the swirl of butter foaming in a pan. He cooks like he’s done it before, Gaby thinks, that’s clear enough, but it feels like he’s watching her watching him. A display of indulgence, minutely orchestrated care, and it feels like nothing more than a part he’s performing, something he’ll shuck off as soon as circumstances call for a newer role.

She doesn’t expect that he will keep doing it.

It’s somehow less affected than Gaby thought it would be; he buys cases of wine, fresh herbs and tiny cheeses, but there are no more truffles, no caviar or threads of saffron. The wine, even to Gaby’s unlearned palate, is smoothly drinkable and nothing more than that.

“Don’t drink all of that,” Solo says. “I need it for the sauce.”

“Not the whole bottle,” Gaby says, shrugging. Tops up her glass again. Solo frowns at her. Takes the bottle away, exasperation clear in the line of his shoulders, and Gaby shrugs again, moves to the sofa, kicks her shoes off her heels so they’re dangling from her toes.

“I am never wearing these shoes again,” she says. “My feet are killing me.”

“Blame Illya, he chose them,” Solo tells her. Gaby crosses her legs. Rests one ankle on the other, sips her wine, rolls her eyes at him.

“Don’t try that,” she says, “I know your style, Solo. Illya would never have chosen these in a thousand years.” Napoleon just smirks at her, turns back to the counter to do something complicated with his chef knife and a pile of herbs and shallots. Gaby looks at him a minute: his shirtsleeves rolled to the elbow, collar unbuttoned and hair falling out of place, an old canvas apron slung low on his hips. He looks undone, she thinks; pared down to his bones, all his glitter stripped away, and it makes her feel tender and cruel in equal measure. 

She drinks her wine. Holds a swallow in her mouth for a long moment, tastes the mineral chill of it. They’ve drunk all the Lillet, or she’d be drinking that: ice and sweetness, the bitterness of quinine. The weather here is hot, breathless, the promise of a thunderstorm about to break. She hopes Illya gets home before the rain.

“What do you think of this plan?” she asks, swallowing her mouthful and reaching for the dossier Waverly had passed over three days ago. Solo shrugs, pauses with the chef knife dangling idly from his fingertips. In Illya’s hand, it would look like a weapon; Gaby’s not stupid enough to think it’s not the same for Solo, that he wouldn’t injure or worse in the right circumstances, but he hides it better, covers violence with this veneer of playboy laziness.

“I don’t like it,” he admits, and that, too, is something new: worry almost breaking through the facade. He's anxious, trying to hide it, and that sets Gaby on edge. 

Solo doesn’t ask if she’s hungry when the food is ready; just puts a plate down in front of her, pours more wine into her glass. The spaghetti smells of the ocean, briny and salt-fresh, and Gaby very slowly drinks another mouthful of wine before using her fork to wrest a clam from its shell. Chews and swallows.

“Hmm,” she says, offers neither thanks nor praise; it's become a game, this push-pull between them. Gaby withholding just for the sake of it, the performance of indifference a petty kind of cruelty that convinces neither of them. But she is hungry, and Solo watches her eat, waits until she's halfway finished with her plate of spaghetti before he raises his own fork to his mouth. 

“Not bad,” he says after his first mouthful, and Gaby shrugs, feigns disdain and lets him see the feint all at once.

“If you care for that sort of thing, I suppose.”

“Would you rather a currywurst?” Solo asks, and Gaby can't hold back her shudder. “It's a little heavy on the parsley, perhaps. A touch too much oil.”

“It's fine,” Gaby says, and regrets it as soon as she's said it. But Solo, unlikely as it is, lets it go without comment, eats the rest of his meal in easy silence, and when he's finished he sets his plate aside, slides out of his chair to his knees in front of her.

“Here,” he says, “let me—” and pulls her bare feet into his lap.

It's uncharacteristically tender, the way he touches her: fingers gentle on her instep, palm cradling her heel. He drags his thumb over the healing scrape on the bone of her ankle—their last mission, a bullet ricochet and chips of stone flying, and yet nothing more than a graze for all of that—and looks like he's about to comment. Opens his mouth and closes it again, begins to massage the ball of her foot a little too gentle for Gaby’s comfort.

“Ah—” she says. Jerks, reflexive. “That tickles.”

Solo looks up at her. “Should I stop?” he asks, his fingertips still curled against her instep, her arch never quite high enough for a perfect _en_ _pointe_ line, and Gaby shakes her head.

“Just— be harder with it,” she tells him, and wills herself to relax into the pain of it.

When Illya comes in his jaw is set in a way that could mean trouble or could simply be Illya’s baseline. He brushes a kiss to Gaby’s hairline, lips warm and body smelling of sweat and pine needles; he’s been lying on the floor of the forest for hours, still and patient and ready.

“Did it go to plan?” she asks, and, “has the rain started yet?”

“No,” Illya says. “It’s coming. Maybe an hour.”

“Still food on the stove,” Solo says, “if you're hungry,” and Illya goes to the kitchen, lifts the lid of the pot.

“What is this.”

“Spaghetti,” Gaby says. “With clams.”

“ _Spaghetti alle vongole_ ,” Solo says, only mildly reproachful, but he doesn't stop pressing his thumbs into the arches of her feet. Illya picks up the pot, walks back into the living room and sits down in the armchair opposite Gaby. Reaches for her fork, abandoned on her empty plate, and shoves a bite into his mouth, chews and swallows. Glances from Gaby to Solo on his knees, back again, twists the corner of his mouth up just enough that she shrugs, slouches more deliberately in her seat so that her hem rides another three inches up her bare thighs.

“My feet hurt,” she says. “Napoleon chose terrible shoes.”

“Yes,” Illya agrees, grave. “I told him.”

“Oh,” Gaby says, meaningful, glancing down at Solo, “did you?”

“They look good,” Solo tells her, shoulders rising and falling in the kind of insouciant shrug she knows beyond doubt he’s spent hours practising. “Anyway, you danced first solo for three years, you can’t tell me they’re worse than pointe shoes.”

“True,” Gaby says, ceding the point. Is aware, suddenly, of her feet, their imperfection, her toes callused and broken and re-broken until her middle toes still, years later, ache before rain. But Solo finds the pinch-point, digs his fingertips into it, and all her breath goes out of her at once so that she can think of nothing but that bright point of pain fading into aching pleasure and relief.

“This is good,” Illya declares, eating another mouthful. Solo raises an eyebrow.

“Thank you, Kuryakin. It's nothing much, but I thought it'd do.”

“Solo likes to look after us,” Gaby says to Illya, and then, in Russian: “our little American oppressor.”

Illya almost smiles. “ _Tovarisch_ ,” he says, fond in the way he only is when she tries Russian. “Look at him, taking care of you now.”

“He looks good on his knees, don’t you think?” Gaby asks. Lifts her free foot, sets it down on Solo’s shoulder, and he pauses for a moment, turns his face to press a kiss to the bare skin of her calf. Gaby hooks her heel over his shoulder to pull him in, presses her fingertips to the hem of her skirt and slides it up until it reaches her hips, and there’s something about having Solo on his knees for her and Illya watching, intent and serious, that makes her feel greedy.

“Gaby wants something,” says Illya then, low, directed at Solo. He sits back in his chair, drops his fork into the pot and reaches in with his fingers. Picks out a clam and sucks the meat from the shell. “Go on, cowboy.”

“Do you?” Solo asks, looking up at her, “do you want something?” but he's already reaching for her underwear. Gaby lifts her hips to ease its passage, feels it catch and then slide silky down her thighs, and then she's sitting back again, legs spread wide and Solo in the V of them. She's wet; wet enough she can smell it, salt-sweet, and the thought of Solo's mouth on her makes her wetter, makes her clench and pulse and catch her breath.

Solo pauses for a moment. Looks up at her, makes and holds eye contact, and then he’s leaning in, pushing her thighs wider apart. Presses his mouth to the pale skin of her inner thigh, traces his tongue in a slow circle over the taut line of muscle and then exhales, hot. Bites, not hard but sharp, and Gaby jolts, feels her cunt pulse again. Her blood’s rushing in her ears and Solo hasn’t even got his mouth where she wants it yet; she knows he’s trying to push her into taking him by the hair and dragging him in, but she refuses to give him the satisfaction.

“Go on,” she says instead, “you've been wanting it all evening, haven't you?” and Solo growls a little in the back of his throat. 

“Do you think she'll give you what you want?” Illya says, voice evenly modulated in the way that Gaby knows he's learned from Solo. He doesn't achieve it quite as perfectly, not as smoothly American, but she's still impressed. “Do you really think you've earned it?”

Solo exhales again, a ragged little noise, and his hot breath makes Gaby shiver, counter-intuitive.

“Get on with it,” she tells him, “I don't have all night,” and there's that noise again before he finally gets his mouth on her cunt.

He's good at it, very good; she would have expected nothing less. She can feel herself flushing, sweat beginning to prickle at her temples, and bites back the gasp that builds behind her teeth. Perhaps Solo can sense that she's withholding her pleasure from him, keeping herself in check, or he simply understands that it's another iteration of her feigned disregard, but it seems to push him to greater effort. He pulls back, looks up at her; his mouth is wet, obscenely slicked and shining in the lamplight, and it makes her want to hit him just to see how he'd react to her knuckles splitting his lip.

“Please,” she says instead, relenting: Solo breathes out almost reverent, eyes falling closed. “Please,” she says again; touches her fingertips to his hair, the thick waves of it, and Solo blinks up at her. Sucks two of his fingers into his mouth, wetting them, and then pushes both into her in one hard thrust. Gaby gasps, surprised. Arches up into it, and Solo twists his fingers, works them in and out of her until her cunt feels like it's dripping; she probably is, given by the wet noises she can hear herself making.

“Give her more,” Illya says, just the hint of breathlessness in his voice. “She wants it. And put your mouth back on her, before I come and do it myself.” Gaby looks over at him; he's sitting back in his chair, leaning on his elbow with his thumb under his chin, knuckles pressed to his mouth, index finger aligned along the sharp lines of his jaw and cheekbone. He's holding himself very still, just the way he would during one of his interminable solo chess matches, but Gaby catches the way his finger is tapping against his thigh. He catches her catching him. Raises an eyebrow, rearranges his long legs so that his left ankle is resting on his opposite knee.

“Yes,” she says, “give me more,” and Solo listens. Pushes a third finger into her, rough, and sets his mouth back on her clit, sucks it hard enough to be almost painful. Gaby breathes through it until she finds the curling tide of pleasure, pitches into it and lets it catch her body up so that she rides it through one wave and washes cresting into another. “Yes,” she gasps, “yes, yes,” and reaches again for his hair, tightens her fingers in it now so that she knows it must hurt.

“Fuck,” Solo swears, an explosive little gasp of breath, and Gaby comes a third time, lightning flashing behind her eyes and blood pounding so loud in her ears she can't form a coherent thought. “Fuck,” Solo says again, his whole body a single taut line from the crown of his head down to his knees, and Gaby pulls his hair harder, harder, until he cries out, folds forward into it, collapses against her thighs while a thunderclap echoes around them.

Solo is breathing hard. His shoulders are loose, suddenly free of their tensely coiled precision. Gaby looks down at him, his head resting in her lap. Strokes his hair away from his forehead, tucks a curl of it back behind one ear.

“Good,” she says, “you were very good, Napoleon, thank you,” and hears him sigh, very quiet, just as the rain starts to fall.

**Author's Note:**

> gonna be honest with u all, this was entirely an excuse for a joke about spaghetti alle vongole


End file.
